Lead Data Engineer - Enterprise Data & AI Retrieval

Booz Allen Hamilton; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 78,000 - 176,000; Full time

Job summary

Booz Allen Hamilton seeks a Lead Data Engineer to design enterprise data platforms and retrieval services for AI applications. You will build pipelines, knowledge indexes, and data architectures that ground agents in authorized enterprise information. You will work with source-system owners and engineering teams to define data contracts, integrate structured and unstructured sources, maintain permissions, lineage, quality, and freshness.

U.S. citizenship is required.

Qualifications

• Experience designing or implementing enterprise data platforms and lakehouse architectures.
• Experience in SQL and Python with developing, testing, and operating ETL or ELT pipelines.
• Experience defining data models, schemas, data contracts, APIs, and access patterns.
• Experience with data governance, lineage, quality controls, and monitoring.
• Knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector indexes, and semantic search.
• Ability to troubleshoot ingestion and retrieval failures and assess data quality.
• Ability to translate enterprise requirements into architecture decisions and governance patterns.
• Ability to implement and maintain ingestion, transformation, indexing, and retrieval services.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust or Suitability/Fitness determination.

Responsibilities

• Design data architectures and build pipelines, knowledge indexes, and retrieval services.
• Collaborate with source-system owners to define data contracts and integrate sources.
• Maintain permissions, lineage, quality, and freshness of data.
• Coordinate with AI Engineering on retrieval behavior and response quality.

Skills

Enterprise data platforms

SQL

Python

ETL/ELT pipelines

Data models & schemas

Data governance

Retrieval augmentation

Public Trust clearance

Bachelor's degree

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Databricks

Spark

Delta Lake

Vector databases

Job description

Booz Allen Hamilton seeks a Lead Data Engineer to design enterprise data platforms and retrieval services for AI applications. You will build pipelines, knowledge indexes, and data architectures that ground agents in authorized enterprise information. You will work with source-system owners and engineering teams to define data contracts, integrate structured and unstructured sources, maintain permissions, lineage, quality, and freshness.

U.S. citizenship is required.